Happy new year GTAW!

[Nervous]

We're now closer to our 10 years celebration than to our opening 6 years ago, it is a scary thought as time goes by very quick!

I personally wanted to wish you all a happy new year, we're entering 2023 with a global world state that might be the worse most of us had to experience yet since many of us were still teenagers or kids in 2009; and for many of you it means sacrifices : potentially less gaming time, less money to spend and a refocus on real life priorities. It is fully understandable.

 

I regularly get messages from some of you thanking me for the amazing platform that GTAW is as it allows you to escape your real life problems, bad news, difficult moments, and knowing that I can bring some lights and some joy in difficult times for you is what keeps me pushing harder and harder to bring more content, quality & time into GTAW. There is nothing more powerful than these messages, and I thank you for taking the time to give such feedbacks.

 

In the past months, we've also seen troubles coming along for GTAW : our host decided to increase all prices by 20 to 30%, while at the same time our population was dropping and the payments were more than divided by 2 still now as we introduced some features that led to people not buying platinum anymore (business changes), a source code leak from a former developer, the Rockstar's blog message about RP servers that led to some of our payment platforms and other partners freezing their commercial links with us and funds.

 

But we've also managed to grow the development team bigger than ever, and to deliver more updates than ever, with a huge focus on bug fixing and bringing new amazing features into the game these past months. Our goal this year is to finish what we've started in 2022 and to make GTAW more accessible to everyone while keeping the advanced commands for all players, thus by finishing the deployment of UIs for features lacking UIs (of course we'll still not remove text commands!) or adding easy way to interact with objects / players around you. We also want to keep pushing for more advanced & in-depth systems, and to make your life easier when roleplaying.

 

The Liberty City server is in a difficult state right now but has a strong small community, we're still not sure of what's our full plan ahead for it as we've been denied all marketing partnerships requests so far just because of our usage of the Liberty City map. I'll bring more news about the server major changes soon, but unless Rockstar forces us to close it one day or if it reaches 0 regular players we have no reason to close the server. We're probably going to try & provide a fully different experience with Liberty City while keeping it merged, to test something new and ground breaking for strict roleplay, but it is yet to be fully decided.

I am still in discussion with various marketing networks and partners to set up big events for GTAW & Los Santos too, however all of these takes time (especially since I am fully new to it) and I'll not have more news to share for now about this, however the subject is clearly a major goal of 2023.

 

I also mentioned in the previous problems that we had lost more than half of our server income in the past months, while facing price increases on the host : in order to tackle this issue, I do not want to increase any prices or packages, but we're working on implementing a new tier that would be named "Partner", and unlocks more of everything already available to platinum, along with a monthly partner meeting with me & management to discuss strategic server design choices / explanations of where we're going. The status would be a bit special for Discord and Forum as it would require a monthly subscription to keep the title whereas Platinum & others do not. The goal of this new tier is to introduce a way for our best supporters to invest themselves even more into GTAW. There will be more information coming soon about this role! So to summarize, no changes at all if what you have in your current platinum limits are fine for you and if you're not interested in taking part in monthly meetings.

 

Before this message ends, I want to thank all the staff team from both Los Santos and Liberty City for this year - everyone has done an amazing job and I've been very proud of our recent changes, team rosters and positive mindsets. A lot of efforts was done by many of the administrators in the past months while their time is also restricted, and I cannot thank them enough for this.

 

On a final note, we'll also be starting 2023 with a wave of unbans for players who were banned more than 2 years ago, as in most cases it doesn't make sense to keep a ban for more than 2 years. Players change a lot in 2 years and became more mature, forgot about GTAW and do not care about appealing or do not even know how to do it. LC has shown us that a clean record didn't mean chaos, and that most banned players had changed in good.

This unban will happen under specific conditions, the following ban reasons will not be unbanned : 

- Anything related to extreme OOC harassment / bullying

- Anything related to OOC misconduct from men to women, or women to men

- Any sexual subjects related bans (pedo, porn sharing, unsollicitated pictures etc)

- Doxxing

If you also had more than 3 bans in total, you'll not be unbanned.

Administrators may also request specific players to not be unbanned for specific contexts that do not meet these generic criterias, and if as a player you were personally harmed by another player banned more than 2 years ago then you can contact me to let me know about it and your wish for them to not be unbanned.

 

Oh and.. new clothes are coming very soon!

 

Best regards,

Edited January 5, 2023 by Nervous